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Fred Wertheimer

Fred Wertheimer is the president, CEO, and founder of Democracy 21, a non-profit organization dedicated to campaign finance reform. From 1981 to 1995, he was the president of Common Cause.

Sara Fritz interviewed Wertheimer on September 14, 2007.

Most people I talk to are critical, you might say, of McCain-Feingold.

Are you talking to political practitioners or citizens?

Political practitioners in Washington. I was hoping I could come to you for the other point of view. So tell me what positive things have been created as a result of this.

Well, McCain-Feingold accomplished its goals. The purpose of it was to prevent federal officeholders and political party officials from raising huge, corrupting, unlimited contributions to use for their campaigns, through the political parties, from corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals who were interested in government decisions. And those contributions are gone from the system, so that the corruptive nexus between huge unlimited contributions and federal officeholders has been cut off.

Now ironically, there were all kinds of screams that the sky was falling and the political parties would be destroyed if this money disappeared. And the fact of the matter is, the political parties have done fine. They have raised record amounts of hard money. They haven’t suffered. They have switched their base.

According to studies done by Anthony Corrado and Norm Ornstein, the biggest single source of contributions to the parties now is smaller donors, which means they have had to go back out to citizens around the country, back out to grassroots fundraising and to a broader base of small donors. That’s healthy for the parties and it’s healthy for the country.

So the bottom line is, if you look at the primary, basic goal of McCain-Feingold, it was to get rid of the relationship between people who hold office and unlimited contributions, which were six-figure contributions, and in some cases, became seven-figure contributions. Those contributions not only can corrupt government decisions, but they create the appearance of corruption.

That’s a good explanation. What negatives do you see, from your point of view? What downside?

I don’t see negatives from the law.

You still see weaknesses in the system?

Well, first of all, all this law was designed to do was deal with soft money. For example, some of the fallacious criticisms here are: look, there is still a lot of money being spent in politics. This law was never about the total amount of money spent in politics. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was the kind of money that was going to the political parties and being raised by federal officeholders.

Did you hope it would limit the total, though?

No, that was not a goal. I mean if you are going to limit the total amount of money in some way, then you need to deal with the system for financing congressional races. And you need to deal with fixing the presidential public financing system. But this was never the stated goal. The stated goal had to do with dealing with a serious corruption problem, one that Congress had found to exist and passed laws to address it. The Supreme Court found that the case had been made and upheld its constitutionality. That’s what it was about.

Now we still have the work to do on congressional financing and presidential financing. But in terms of the stated, specific goals of this legislation, they have been met with no damage to the political parties, with no damage to the ability of candidates to raise and spend money. Under the existing system, which enormously benefits incumbents and disadvantages challengers . . .

To what do you attribute the fact that the hard money has risen? Is it all small donors? I don’t think so.

No. No. Part of it is need. The parties had to go back to work and get off the addiction of $100,000 and $500,000 and $1 million contributions. Part of it is an increase — although the increase was not that big — in the contribution limits for candidates and parties. In this case, the only thing that matters are the contribution limits for parties. But it was mostly the fact that you had to go out and work for your money in a different way.

Now the other thing that has affected it is the politics in the country, kind of the intense interest by Democrats and Republicans. But in this particular timeframe, on the Democratic side by activists who have been concerned about what’s happened in Washington, been concerned about the war. And that has been a factor.

Is the increase in small donors simply a function of the Internet?

I think that’s a big part of it. The Internet is, potentially, the most positive development in campaign financing in many years, since it is a potential source for broad-based funding from citizens and relatively small contributions. And if we could figure out a way of systemizing it so lots of candidates could raise money this way effectively, it would greatly increase the role of the citizen in the small donation and candidate campaigns.

You could get quite giddy thinking about this as a possibility. Is there a way to encourage it?

I think we’ll find out. I think, though, this is one of the most important developments and opportunities for having grassroots fundraising that bypasses and potentially could greatly dilute the importance of the Washington-based fundraising, the PACs, the lobbyists, the trade associations. It could bring citizens back into the picture in a big way. Now we are just really at the beginning of seeing whether this can be figured out. It’s a very important development.

It certainly is. I wanted to ask you one more question before I moved on. The fact that the candidates are not going to take public financing anymore, does that disturb you in any way, or was that predictable?

No, that’s a huge problem. But it’s a problem that was predictable, because we have never been allowed to modify and make adjustments in the presidential public financing since it passed in 1974. So what has happened is the spending limits have become outmoded. They are far too low for the primaries.

Now, also, this frontloading has further exacerbated the problem. There are not enough public funds available in the primaries. And the fact of the matter is that we have known that the system had to be adjusted for many years. Congress just never let any reform legislation of significance pass from 1974 until 2002.

Was it ever actually considered to raise the public financing limits? Or was it just too controversial?

Well, it wasn’t controversial. The FEC had made a number of recommendations over the years, like repeal the state-by-state limits, just there was never an opportunity, because it was caught up in the larger effort by opponents of reform to block any kind of significant reforms. I did a piece on the history of reform efforts that I will give you when we are done here.

Oh, I would like that.

So the fact of the matter is it’s outmoded now and we are seeing the potential price of an outmoded system: arms-race approach to raising and spending money; inability for any number of candidates to get sufficient funds to be heard; the rise of the bundlers who replaced the big contributors of the pre-Nixon, pre-Watergate reform era. So we have to fix it. And that’s a big, major priority for our organization, to get this system fixed in time for the next presidential election. You have the integrity of the office of the presidency at stake here. You wind up with a presidency back on the auction block in a totally privately funded system.

If neither nominee goes into public financing in the primary or general election, we face the two presidential nominees spending $1 billion between them in this presidential election in private funds. That’s an absurd situation, which will only get worse in the future. So I believe that this election will make the case for why we have to fix the presidential public financing system, which almost everyone participated in up until 2000 when President [George W.] Bush went out of the primary. But President Bush took public financing in the general election in 2000.

You are the perfect person to ask this question. The growth in 527s among Democrats came after this law was passed. The question in my mind is whether that would have happened anyway, because they were deciding to match the Republican network? Or whether McCain-Feingold led to that?

Well, I think it was triggered, in good part, by people trying to figure out how to get around McCain-Feingold. But in doing so, they broke the law. Now you have to go back. I mean at the core of campaign finance laws at the national level is an FEC who not only has a track record of refusing to enforce the laws, but has a track record of opening up the loopholes. The soft-money system was created by the FEC. I mean they created the system. And Congress had to shut it down. And the Supreme Court, in its opinion, recognized that but for FEC interpretations, there never would have been soft money in the first place.

After McCain-Feingold passed, the FEC adopted a series of regulations to implement it. That simply opened up huge new loopholes. Our side had to go to court. We had a judge declare 15 of the BICRA [the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002] FEC regulations contrary to law. I don’t think you’ll find an example of that anywhere of a federal agency having 15 regulations knocked out. So the FEC had to go back and rewrite their regulations. In six cases, they failed to do it properly, in our view. We went back to court. And the judge, in five of those cases, ruled the FEC was still not in compliance.

So here we are five years after McCain-Feingold passed, and we still don’t have a proper legal rule regulation on when coordination occurs. And that’s one of the most important issues in the campaign finance laws. It is illegal for an outside spender to coordinate with a candidate, because that’s like giving the candidate the money. Well, there are important coordination provisions in McCain-Feingold. And five years later we have a court throwing out a second FEC regulation that was worse than the first one. So that’s the context in which to look at 527s and their rise.

In the 2004 election, political operatives on both sides decided, well, let’s just go out there with 527 groups and try to raise some of the money that was taken out of the system. What they were doing was illegal from day one. We tried and others tried to get the FEC to issue a regulation to make clear that 527 groups spending money to influence federal elections had to register and comply with the limits on the contributions they could receive. The FEC refused to do that.

They did issue a piece of this to take effect after the 2004 presidential election that said when a 527 was spending money on voter mobilization efforts, at least half of that had to be hard money. So we and the Campaign Legal Center and the Center for Responsive Politics filed complaints against six 527 groups in the 2004 election for violating the law. We sat and waited.

We ultimately wound up filing complaints in the 2006 election against four more 527 groups. The groups we filed complaints against included the Swift Boat group; Progress for America Voter Fund, which was a Republican group; ACT [America Coming Together] and the Media Fund, the two biggest Democratic Groups. Also, our side filed a lawsuit. It was filed by representatives [Chris] Shays [Republican of Connecticut] and [Marty] Meehan [Democrat of Massachusetts], to call on the court to order the FEC to issue a regulation here.

Now the combination of the complaints that were pending and the lawsuit against the FEC forced the FEC to pay attention to this, so they came into court. And they never argued what the 527 groups were doing was legal. That was not their argument. Their argument was, we are going to enforce the law against 527 groups on a case-by-case basis rather than by issuing a regulation to make clear to everyone what was going on here.

And we said, look, case-by-case basis is not the way to do this. Everyone ought to have a clear regulation that has the force of law of what the ground rules are here. Furthermore, we argued, you haven’t done anything. This went on for years. And finally, three years later, the commission started reaching conciliation agreements with groups. They reached a conciliation agreement with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, with Progress for America Voter Fund, and recently with ACT. Now the ACT conciliation agreement . . .

Club for Growth wasn’t one?

Yeah. They finally reached one with Club for Growth. But these were the big players in the presidential. In the case of ACT, the FEC found that ACT had spent $100 million illegally. There is nothing like this in American history: $100 million in illegal expenditures found by an enforcement agency.

And the fine?

And the fine: $775,000 — less than 1 percent of their expenditures three years after the election. So, on the one hand they found illegal activity. On the other hand, they found it so late and with so small consequences that they haven’t provided, in our view, the kind of deterrence we need to prevent this in the 2008 election. In the case of Swift Boat, they found, I believe, $20 million worth of violations. And in Progress for America Voter Fund, they found $30 million worth of violation. If they reach a settlement with the Media Fund — we don’t know whether they will — that’s another $50 million.

So here you have a formal recognition by an enforcement agency that the big 527 spenders, with one still outstanding, spent $150 million illegally, or $170 [million] — I am going to get the precise numbers so you have them for these purposes — which is extraordinary.

I have only read one of these opinions. Are they all based on the percentages?

No, only the ACT one deals with the percentage one. In the case of ACT, it wasn’t just the percentage. In the case of ACT, they found that $70 million of the $100 million should have been financed all with hard money. So that’s just flat-out illegal use of mostly soft money.

For the other $30 million, they found that they had been financed 98 percent soft money and 2 percent hard money, where they should have had 90 percent hard money. So this is a massive unheard of set of violations created by the 527 groups in the 2004 presidential elections. We still haven’t heard from them about the 2006 elections.

So if you go back to it, one of the arguments that has been made about McCain-Feingold is, well look, 527 groups came along and they made large expenditures anyway. But the fact of the matter is, what they made was large, illegal expenditures. It is not a fault of McCain-Feingold that the Federal Election Commission failed to enforce the law and that political operatives went out and massively broke the law. That’s a failure of proper enforcement of the campaign finance laws.

While the judge ultimately dismissed our case, because he said that any federal agency has broad discretion to decide whether to use case-by-case or a rule to enforce the law, he also found that using a rule was reasonable here. He criticized the FEC’s reasons for not using a rule. He just didn’t feel that he could find beyond the broad discretion. But the complaints in lawsuits were the triggering mechanism for forcing the FEC to deal with this stuff.

Right. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise, you don’t think?

Now in finding violations, they dealt with it to the degree that they recognized that these kinds of activities were illegal. In providing penalties in a timely way, they haven’t dealt with it. So they set the stage for, potentially, groups going out there and violating the law in 2008.

Because there is no overall . . .

Because there is no regulation. Our challenge now is to force this issue, to make it very clear to 527 groups, and to force the FEC to make it clear to 527 groups, that they cannot do in the 2008 elections what they did in 2004 and 2006. And that relates, in part, to the area with all of the attack ads that they ran. I mean these groups ran ads to promote and attack federal candidates.

Their purpose, clearly, was to influence the federal election. And they used illegal soft money to do it. Now we are at a stage, this time around, where we are going to pursue 527 groups at the FEC and at the Justice Department for potential criminal violations if people go out and do the same thing that the commission has now indicated.

Can’t this be another case of justice delayed, though?

Yes, that’s what we’re going to have to fight. We are going to have to fight the political calculation of political operatives thinking that we’ll go out and break the law, spend millions of dollars, and get a small fine down the road after the election is over. Just think about it. Think about if you have a presidential election decided on $100 million in illegal expenditures. I mean that calls into question the legitimacy of the election in the same way that massive voter fraud would.

So the FEC has an obligation here. And we are going to go to the FEC. They have an obligation to make very clear to 527 groups that they can’t do in 2008 what they did in 2004 and 2006. And they have to do it in a way that is clear to all the groups what the ground rules are.

They seem to be amassing on the horizon, however, at this point.

Well, we’ll have to see. We haven’t seen the numbers yet. Any lawyer at any 527 group really ought to think twice about breaking the law in 2008 as they did in 2004 and 2006, because they are going to do it knowingly and willfully. And that’s a criminal standard, not just a civil standard.

So we are going to take the same kind of aggressive approach with 527 groups in 2008 that we took in 2004 and 2006, but with a clear goal of not letting people think they can break the law with no consequences until three years later, and then with minor consequences. I mean none of the people involved in breaking the law are held accountable by these conciliation agreements. The penalties are paid by the committees. There is an absence of real accountability here. And we are going to try to ensure that there is real accountability next time.

Is the “we” in your sentence an established coalition of groups?

Well, on the complaints stuff, Democracy 21 has done this with the Campaign Legal Center. The Center for Responsive Politics was involved in 2004. In 2006, it was the Campaign Legal Center. And in terms of monitoring complaints, we and the Campaign Legal Center will be very aggressive about this. In terms of potential lawsuits, those lawsuits have been brought by the sponsors of the BICRA legislation in one way or another. We have a legal team that Democracy 21 and I coordinate that represents the members. That has three national law firms and a number of very experienced campaign finance lawyers as part of this legal team. It’s led by Wilmer Hale and Roger Witten, who is a senior partner, and Seth Waxman.

Wilmer Hale is . . .

Former Wilmer Cutler & Pickering. It’s a firm. I’ll give you a background piece of paper on the legal team.

So in the Swift Boat case, they received a fine of less than $300,000 for finding that they spent $20 million illegally. Let me give you this information for the record. The FEC found, in response to our complaint, Swift Boat spent almost $20 million illegally on TV ads attacking John Kerry. They fined them less than $300,000.

In the case of Progress for America Voter Fund, they had a $750,000 penalty there. I don’t think they have an amount of the expenditures. I mean they found some $45 million in soft money contributions. And in ACT, as I said, they found $100 million in illegal expenditures. Now all of those were the result of complaints that . . .

And Media [Fund]?

We don’t have a finding yet. They haven’t reached a settlement with the Media Fund yet.

And there was another one, wasn’t there?

Well, there are others but these are the major ones.

Now of these things, Media Fund and ACT have gone out of business, right?

Yeah, but we are going to get new ones. These are drive-by shootings.

As far as I can see, PAVF and Swift Boats are still around.

They are around. But you don’t know what they are going to do.

You are right. They can come from anywhere.

They are going to come from anywhere. If they happen in this way, they are likely to be created, raise a whole lot of money, and spend it illegally. And then save a sum of money for penalties and go out of business.

Right. Now the FEC has set the 50/50 rule.

That’s a rule.

But they haven’t dealt, as you said . . .

With the attack ads. With the ad campaigns.

Or coordination.

Well, we haven’t found coordination. But they still don’t have a legal rule. The Progress for America Voter Fund and Swift Boat were about ads, so they have had findings of illegal activity regarding ads. And now there is a rule in place, the 50/50 rule, although it’s being challenged in court by people who want to spend more money and keep doing this scam. But the ad campaigns, that’s the area right now, for us, of focus to make sure people understand that those are illegal from day one. And we will monitor what happens here very closely and be prepared to bring various kinds of actions and keep the pressure on the FEC.

Let me make this clear: If the FEC were properly enforcing the law, 527 groups would not be an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, period. It would be clear to everyone. They would, through clearly stated rules, [know] that they were knowingly and willfully violating the law if they did this. If you spend soft money to influence federal campaigns, it would be a clear, and you would face . . .

You could still do issue ads, right?

Well, what do you mean by issues? 527 groups are not about issues, so they can’t do issue ads.

But they don’t do issue ads at all?

Well, they claim they are issue ads. The IRS definition of a 527 group is a group whose primary purpose is to influence elections. So candidates do ads about issues, but they are not issue ads. They are campaign ads.

I was thinking of the most recent ad, the MoveOn ad.

Well, they are a (c)(4) as well. They stopped making 527 expenditures. So advocacy groups can still do issue ads.

This is another problem, that so many organizations have a 527, a 501(c), and a PAC.

Some do.

You try to follow the money in those reports.

I do try to follow them.

It’s very hard.

Yeah, but the fact of the matter is, (c)(4)s are a different question. They can do advocacy ads, issue ads, but they can’t have as a major purpose influencing federal elections. And we will monitor them as well. But those people are subject to tax laws and IRS laws. And it’s kind of a different animal. And the major game-players in 2004 and 2006 were the 527 groups.

Now let me run one thing past you. You get a contribution for millions of dollars from a homebuilder in Texas. It goes to a 527 in Sacramento. And then it’s spent on ads in two or three states, mostly in the Midwest and the East Coast. Isn’t that a prima facie case of coordination? I mean why would that pattern . . .?

Who is he coordinating with? You have to coordinate with a candidate. The group has to coordinate with a candidate in order for it to be a violation.

Not just with the [Republican campaign committees] or whatever?

Oh, or coordination with the parties. But you have to be able to establish and demonstrate it. That does not do it.

That does not do it. It certainly makes you suspicious.

Well, but there are sophisticated ways of running ads in the same place at the same time. I mean you have political operatives involved with these 527 groups. Now if you have the same political operatives involved with the 527 groups working for the parties or working for the candidates at the same time, then you have a potential coordination issue. But what I am telling you is, we still don’t have a proper coordination rule on the books. But you need to demonstrate actual coordination here, not conscious parallelism.

Right. I found it amusing or confusing that some people who are contributing to these 527s also seem to contribute to campaign finance reform groups.

Well, that’s their business.

Do you get any money from George Soros?

No. I mean we got some money a few years ago from Open Society, but never anything from George Soros. And we don’t get any money from Open Society.

Why do you [think]?

I am not going to get inside their heads. Some people want to get campaign finance reform. And they want to play until the system is fixed.

And they want to be players as well.

Well, they want to play until the system is fixed.

And do you have any opinion about the Democracy Alliance?

No.

Have you read the book called The Argument [Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai]?

No.

It portrays the Democracy Alliance as an effort on the part of Democrats to match the right-wing conspiracy.

Well, maybe. But look, these laws deal with campaign activities, not with issue and policy groups.

But they are funding Get Out The Vote and ads.

And they are funding policy groups. Yeah. So it just depends on a group-by-group basis what they are doing.

Have you seen any new groups on the horizon that look like they might supplant the old ones?

No, I haven’t seen it yet.

What do you think of Club for Growth?

It got out of the 527 business.

That’s how it seems to have settled.

Well, they paid a fine.

I know. But they just agreed that they would use the name of a different organization.

Well, they had a (c)(4) before, I believe. So we will watch them very carefully to see if they comply with tax laws. I don’t know if they will.

That seems like a peculiar settlement to me.

Well, that wasn’t part of their settlement.

Yes. It changes the name of the defendant.

Well, that’s not part of their settlement with the FEC.

It changes the name of the defendant. It’s the Citizens Club for Growth that got fined.

Yeah. I haven’t looked at the details on that. And maybe that’s because the other one is out of business. This is all that’s left, and they are making them pay the fine. But I don’t think that was relevant; Club for Growth was trying to become a (c)(4) so they could argue that they are not doing campaign activities anymore. They are just doing issue ads. Their history is a history of a group that intervenes in elections. And if you are a (c)(4), you cannot have as a major purpose intervening or conducting partisan activities. So they will have to be able to meet that test.

You said earlier in this interview that this coming election would demonstrate why these things have to be changed.

The presidential system — why we need to fix the presidential public financing system.

We were, at that point, talking about expenditures. But it looks like we are going to get more negative ads this time around.

I am talking about the candidates’ spending. Well, and financing.

Right. But you are not talking about public reaction to the substance of these ads?

No. I am talking about a system in which presidential candidates can run for office without becoming dependent on bundlers to raise them huge sums of money. And in a system that doesn’t create an arms-race mentality that drives people to excess in terms of fundraising.

It must kill you to see the early primaries being discussed as an arms race . . .

Nothing kills me, Sara. Nothing kills me. Look, it depends on what kind of ads you are talking about. Advocacy communications in our society are constitutionally protected. Ads that are for the purpose of influencing elections ought to be funded by money that’s legal in elections. And what happened with 527 groups is they were doing the same thing that everyone else in the campaigns was doing. But they were doing it under a different set of rules. The candidates, the political parties, the registered PACs were all playing under a set of rules that limited contributions and prohibited certain kinds of contributions, while the 527 groups were doing the exact same thing: spending money, sole purpose, major purpose, to influence federal elections. And they were playing outside the rules.

Let me give you right now: The Progress for America Voter Fund funded over $31 million in illegal ads, communications. So let me go back for a minute. You have $100 million in illegal expenditures by ACT; $30 million plus in illegal expenditures by Progress for America Voter Fund; $20 million by Swift Boat. We’ll see what happens with the Media Fund. But just those three, if you add that up, that’s $150 million in illegal expenditures. It was exactly $150 million.

Now the two presidential candidates in the 2004 general election spent approximately $150 million total. So these three groups spent as much illegally in the general election as the two presidential candidates spent in public funds in the general election. Now that’s no way to run a railroad. And the idea that the FEC three years later is doing small fines on them, relatively small fines, is not only absurd, but it is fundamentally undermining our democracy and presidential elections. That’s just three groups. And we haven’t yet heard from the Media Fund.

So this can’t continue. The idea is that this is a rough and ready process out there, and politics isn’t bean bag. But illegal activity doesn’t fit the definition of rough and tumble politics. It fits the definition of breaking the laws massively at the expense of the elections and the American people. And it has got to be stopped in the 2008 presidential election and congressional elections.

Are there some legislative remedies, I assume, that you have as well?

On 527s? Yes. And we are pursuing that.

What are they? I mean can you generally tell me?

Well, it would basically make clear that 527 groups that spend money on ads to promote and attack federal candidates have to register as federal committees. Once you register, you can’t take corporate and labor union money. And you can’t take contributions from individuals of more than $5,000.

So you are not a 527 anymore.

You are registered PAC. All PACs are 527 groups. 527 is simply an IRS definition of who gets . . .

Right. But instead of being a separate category over here beside PACs, you become a PAC.

Outside the rules. You are a registered federal PAC, just like everyone else.

All they have done is really just say that if you are a 527, you have to at least register with us. But you are talking about making them PACs.

Yeah. Well, 527s register and report to the IRS.

But they do report now to . . .

They do report, because we got that in 2000.

But all they do is say, “Here we are.”

Yeah. I mean that doesn’t solve any problems, because they are breaking the campaign finance laws. So we have been pursuing this in the courts and in Congress.

Any chance of that?

We will continue to pursue it in Congress. We’ll see. We never know.

You are right, though. Both sides, both Republicans and Democrats, kind of seem to be enjoying the Wild West feel of it.

Yeah. Well, we’ll see what happens this time around. We have a somewhat different playing field because of these FEC [guidelines], and we’ll find out whether it’s real or not.

But clearly groups that want to sustain are dropping the 527s; like Club for Growth is a good example.

Well, that’s one example.

You said MoveOn has.

MoveOn did it in 2004. They stopped early on. But those groups were covered by the electioneering communications until the Wisconsin Right to Life decision. Now we just have to see how the Wisconsin Right to Life decision is implemented. And in our view, if people want to go out and run attack ads about candidates, you are still covered by McCain-Feingold, and that means within 60 days of a general election, 30 days of a primary. You can’t use corporate and labor union funds for those ads.

But it is a potential loophole that somebody could drive right through, right?

Well, I mean it’s there. It’s there.

And we have yet to see how it’s going to be used.

We’ll see how it plays out. Don’t always assume the worst. We’ll see. The biggest argument about McCain-Feingold from people who wanted to knock it — I mean there were a couple of arguments. It would destroy the parties. It didn’t. The parties are swimming in money.

In fact, they are stronger than ever.

It didn’t shut down the total amount of money being spent. It never was intended to. 527s came along and picked up a bunch of this money. Well, they did it illegally. That is not a fault of McCain-Feingold. That is a fault of a Federal Election Commission that refused to properly enforce the laws and make sure that people didn’t break the laws.

So we have a lot of work to do. We have to fix the presidential financing system. We have to fix the congressional financing system. We have to make sure that 527s stop breaking the law. We have to watch (c)(4)s to make sure they don’t start breaking the law. But McCain-Feingold ended the biggest abuse in our campaign finance system.

The nexus.

An abuse that was a $500 million system by the time it ended, in illegal money based on our view of the law. So you come back time and time again, to an awful lot of the problems in the campaign finance system are caused by a Federal Election Commission who doesn’t understand its job is to protect the interests of the American people and properly enforce the law, as opposed to protecting the interests of the people who are supposed to be regulated by the law.

Do you ever get weary?

No.